Overview

The theme of the day is that Spinoza’s God lacks some features of the God that almost everyone else believes in.

God is not a big person, with something like human psychology. Rather, God is the universe, everything that exists. He not have desires or make choices. Rather, God follows the laws of nature in the same way that everything does. That is because God is everything.

God and Bodies

Spinoza held that extension is one of God’s essential attributes. That means that God is corporeal and, since God is infinite, that corporeal substance is infinite.

Spinoza responds to an objection to this claim. The objectors deny that corporeal substance is infinite on the grounds that it is divisible. They present a dilemma (Spinoza [1677] 2019, 178L).

1. Suppose that corporeal substance is infinite.
2. Suppose it is divided into two parts.
3. The parts cannot be finite: if they were, the infinite would be created by the addition of two finite parts, which is absurd.
4. The parts cannot be infinite: if they were, then there would be an infinite part which is twice as large as the another infinite part, which is also absurd.
5. Therefore, corporeal substance is not infinite
6. Therefore, corporeal substance “cannot pertain to God’s essence,” which is infinite.

Spinoza rejects premise 2. He denies that corporeal substance is divisible, referring to Proposition 12 (Spinoza [1677] 2019, 178R).

Creation and Determinism

Here is one way of thinking of God. God is outside of the universe. He considered whether or not to create the universe and, obviously, decided to create it. In doing so, he considered a variety of ways of making the universe and he chose this particular one.

Spinoza rejects all of that. While God is the cause of the universe, he is identical with the universe rather than separate from it. And God acts according to the laws of nature rather than according to choices or a will. God is free not because he can do anything, but because he is not constrained by anything else.

More generally, everything is necessary, according to Spinoza. There is no purpose to nature; there is no goal that nature strives to achieve. When we think there is, we are projecting our perspective onto God. We have goals and wishes that we strive to achieve. But God or nature is not like that.

Parallelism

What about human beings? That was Descartes’s project: where do finite minds fit into the mechanical material world?

We did not read the parts of the Ethics about the relationship between thought and extension, that is, mind and body. Spinoza’s thinking is very hard to describe. In essence, he believed that thought and extension are two ways of describing the same thing.

Changes in my body are identical to changes in my mind. A thought is the same thing as a physical state of the brain.

However, since thoughts and extension are different attributes. they do not interact with one another. Rather, they exist in parallel.

Needless to say, it is not easy to see how thoughts and extensions could both be just two descriptions of the same thing and also incapable of interacting with one another.